In light rain outside a south Orlando pizza shop last week, Yohan Fonseca worked the trenches in one of Florida's most contentious political battlefields. He was registering voters.

"I love this work," Fonseca said after convincing Ramon Morales, 26, of Orlando to fill out a registration form. "It's really good to help the community. We need to vote."

Fonseca, 22, of Davenport is a paid organizer for the nonprofit Hispanic group National Council of La Raza. He and others are going where some longtime voter-registration organizations say they are afraid to go: anywhere in Florida.

Since passage last year of a Republican-sponsored election-law rewrite, fierce debate has raged over whether the new rules make it tougher for people to register and vote this election year. Among other changes, the new law requires groups and individuals to turn in voter forms within 48 hours — they previously had 10 days — or face fines of $50 per late application, up to a maximum of $1,000 per organization per year.

The debate has a partisan tone. Republicans say the changes, which include other regulations such as using tracking numbers to tie voter applications to the organizations responsible for generating them, are reasonable attempts to curb fraud. Democrats call them "voter suppression," contending they are intended to curb registration and voting, especially by traditionally Democratic minority, disabled and poor residents.

The changes are also opposed by several nonprofit groups that conduct high-profile voter-registration drives. The League of Women Voters, Rock the Vote and others have sued in federal court in Tallahassee to overturn the new law, which took effect July 1; a ruling is expected soon. Meanwhile, they halted their registration drives.

"We've made such important and remarkable progress since the year 2000 which helped restore voter confidence," said Deirdre Macnab, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. "So to see the Legislature take these backward, regressive steps … is appalling."

The law can be daunting. Case in point: LaVon Bracy, a longtime voter-registration volunteer, wife of the Rev. Randolph Bracy Jr., pastor of New Covenant Baptist Church in Orlando, said she felt the pressure when she collected about 15 applications at church on Easter Sunday and then had to go to Gainesville the next day. She hustled back to Orlando that afternoon.

"I had to come by the church, pick up the voter registrations and get to the voter-registration office before 5. I mean ... it was a rush," she said.

Still, the Florida Secretary of State's office reports that 269 groups — ranging from minority-rights organizations such as La Raza and the NAACP to the state Democratic and Republican parties — are signed up to register voters. There are no comparable numbers from past elections because groups were not required to register.

But most of them are inactive, according to state Division of Elections data. The five busiest groups — including both political parties — are responsible for more than 90 percent of the 56,529 applications turned in.

La Raza ranked third, with 9,800 registrations.

"It's a big risk," said Fonseca's supervisor, Yanidsi Valez, La Raza's Orlando field coordinator. "We worry about it every day" and turn in voter applications almost daily, he said.

So far, there has been little enforcement.

Though dozens of cases have been reported to the state, only three were forwarded to the Attorney General's Office for fines, while 12 to 15 more are under review, said Secretary of State spokesman Chris Cate. No one has been fined yet.

Cate said the Division of Elections is being very conservative, looking only for egregious violations. "We're very pro-vote," he said. "We want people to register to vote."

"When you are being lampooned on the Colbert Report or on Jon Stewart, you probably are going to think twice about enforcing what is a dubious law," scoffed University of Florida political-science professor Daniel Smith, who testified about the law in January before a Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in Tampa.

Exhibit A for the comedians is the case of Dawn Quarles, a high-school government teacher in Pace, near Pensacola. She registered 76 students last fall but failed to turn in the forms within 48 hours; she faces a $1,000 fine. A similar case involving a teacher at New Smyrna Beach High School was dropped.

Cate said the difference is that Quarles had a previous infraction for turning in late registrations, and she is registered as a voter-registration agent, so she should have been aware of the law.

Smith said his research shows a "marked decline" in voter registrations — a drop of nearly 50,000 new voters, comparing the last six months of 2011 with the same period in 2007.That's less than one-half of 1 percent of Florida's 11 million registered voters but far more than the 537 votes that decided the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

Smith said other factors — the economy, differences in ballot choices — could account for some of the decline. But not, he said, the entire 18 percent drop from the 279,293 who registered in the last six months of 2007 to the 229,414 in 2011.